[OSM-talk] Amenity key

David Murn davey at incanberra.com.au
Fri Oct 22 21:16:46 BST 2010


On Fri, 2010-10-22 at 19:06 +0200, Claudius wrote:
> Am 22.10.2010 18:28, David Murn:
> >
> > One way I heard it described, is an amenity is something youre likely to
> > want to navigate to.  While that description is a bit vague, it seems to
> > fit most current applications of the key.
> 
> Like amenity=prison ;) http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Prison

If you were visiting someone in an out-of-state prison, it certainly
would be somewhere one might want to navigate to, the same way you might
want to navigate to an ATM, fuel station or school.  You could propose
that footpaths should no longer use the highway= tag, as theyre not
highways, using a similar argument.

The use of general tags like highway or amenity mostly works in stopping
everyone coming up with their own tagging scheme and makes the job for
renderers and data users easier.

> Generally I agree with your definition and the idea of a short singline 
> line one though.

The lack of detail in this instance, isnt just a one-off, its simply
that there are holes in the documentation for all aspects of OSM.  Maybe
a short single-line definition was simply put in as a stub, waiting for
someone to come along later and expand it.

David




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